Recently I had the opportunity to attend a lecture and Q&A by Dr. Peter Jones. In his presentation, he displayed how Romans 1 shows that there are really only two religions in the world. Jones classifies them as oneism and twoism religions. Christianity is a twoism because it recognizes there is a Creator God who exists outside of the universe. So there are two fundamental realities: God and creation. Christians worship the Creator God who is outside of and distinct from his creation. All other worldviews and religions are fundamentally a oneism, that is they worship the creation instead of the Creator (Rom. 1:25). For oneists, there is only the created universe and inevitably in some way creation becomes God.
Jones’s analysis is helpful because it is both biblically based and simple to use. As I thought on this truth I was struck by its application in many areas of life, but especially in the realm of sexuality. These two fundamentally opposed worldviews lead to different sexual views and practices. Why would my mind go there? Because that is exactly where Paul goes in the rest of Romans 1, “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (26-27). Rejection of God leads to embracing sexual sin, namely homosexuality.
What is inescapable in Romans is oneism religion leads to God’s judgment. This judgment takes the form a oneness sexuality. Of course not everyone who embraces oneism is homosexual, but rather homosexuality is the capstone of this worldview. To put it plainly, all our problems fundamentally start with false worship. We are creatures designed to worship and who/what we worship will determine the direction of our lives. This is evident as the oneist worldview leads to a oneness sexuality. By that I mean homosexuality.
The underlying idolatry of all homosexual sin is the rejection of the creator/creature distinction of Christianity. It is an outright rejection of our accountability before our creator. Romans 1 tells us that as we reject God, he hands us over as a society to this oneness in our sexuality. We reject the complementary natural sexual relations of heterosexuality. Homosexuality at its root is loving the same thing that you are when we are designed to love that which is different than us. Homosexuality denies the explicit twoness of human sexuality. Men and women are different, and these differences are complementary. Homosexuality rejects the twoism truth of Christianity both in belief and in practice. What happens as we worship the creation instead of the creator is that inevitably we start to worship the self. Homosexuality is the capstone form of self-worship as it embraces a radical, unnatural oneist view of life.
What we worship determines how we live. God has created human sexuality to reflect the complementary nature of creation, its twoness. This complementary nature is chiefly displayed in the gospel. This is why we are told true marriage, one man and one woman for life, reflects the mystery of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Eph. 5:31-32). It points to the greater reality of God, his creation, and his plan of redemption. In the gospel, Christians are united to Christ. The two become one. In some supernatural way, we are united to God through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Two different realities become one. Marriage is a picture of this reality when a man and woman become one.
Homosexuality a rejects all of this. It denies God’s picture of human sexuality. It denies the glory of God revealed in marriage. It denies the twoism reality of the universe and of human sexuality. This is the unnatural result of rejecting the twoist reality of God and his creation. In its place, mankind embraces a oneism and a unnatural oneness in our sexuality.
Christians must realize that the moral problems we have today run far deeper than most of us realize. It starts not with sexual orientation, but our disposition toward God. If we reject the proper worship of God, we will worship the creation. The implications of this rejection will be felt throughout all of society. It is only by understanding that God exists, and that he is outside of Creation as its Lord, that we can renew our society. Christians must proclaim and live by this truth—this is God’s world and we are called to worship him alone.
Levi J. Secord